The Infrastructural Turn

And so it begins

Over the last few months, I have found myself repeatedly reading and hearing about a new kind of issue affecting young people. It appears quietly, almost apologetically, in newspaper reports, university data, podcasts, policy discussions, and worried conversations between parents and teachers. It rarely sounds dramatic. If anything, the tone is strangely subdued. The story is usually framed in one of two ways.

The first is sympathetic and socially minded: poor young people are living through economic crisis, housing insecurity, debt, unstable futures, and declining opportunity. They are exhausted, anxious, financially stretched, and emotionally overwhelmed. The second is more individualistic and culturally conservative: young people have become disengaged, avoidant, distracted, unwilling to struggle, too comfortable, too mediated, too accustomed to convenience and immediate gratification.

Both explanations contain fragments of truth. Neither comes close to identifying what is actually happening.

What strikes me repeatedly is that almost all of these discussions are attempting to explain profoundly new historical conditions using conceptual frameworks inherited from twenty or thirty years ago. We continue to interpret contemporary behaviour using categories developed before the infrastructural transformation of everyday life had fully taken hold. We are trying to explain an ontological crisis using the language of sociology, policy, motivation, economics, wellbeing, or consumer behaviour alone.

The result is misdiagnosis.

This is precisely why I wrote my forthcoming book on AI, educational leadership, and ontological capture. Because what we are beginning to witness is not simply a generational mood shift, an economic downturn, or a crisis of attention. It is something much deeper and potentially far more serious: the quiet reorganisation of the conditions through which human agency, attachment, presence, and relational life are formed.

And so it begins.

A recent Times Higher Education report revealed that university students in the UK are now missing more than twice as much teaching time as they were twenty years ago. Analysts point towards rising term time employment, financial pressure, mental health concerns, commuting difficulties, changing post pandemic habits, and the widespread availability of recorded lectures online.

Yet all of these explanations, while partially true, remain on the surface of the problem.

Students worked during term time long before smartphones existed. Young people commuted long distances before the internet. Public transport in Britain since the 1950’s has always oscillated between unreliable and catastrophic. Economic pressure on students is not historically new. Nor are periods of social anxiety.

The real historical rupture lies elsewhere.

Over the past two decades, we have quietly reorganised the entire infrastructural environment within which young people become human.

Between roughly 2005 and 2015, schools and universities scaffolded themselves with digital systems: platforms, portals, wireless campuses, dashboards, lecture capture technologies, smartphones, virtual learning environments, behavioural analytics, recommendation systems, predictive software, algorithmic scheduling, social media architectures, and increasingly permanent screen based interaction. Much of this initially appeared helpful, efficient, modern, democratic, and inevitable.

Then something changed.

The infrastructure stopped supporting educational life and increasingly became educational life itself.

The pandemic accelerated this process dramatically, although it did not create it. What Covid accomplished was the normalisation of asynchronous existence. Presence became optional. Human interaction became increasingly mediated through platforms. Shared temporal rhythms weakened. Physical gathering lost its taken for granted status. Institutions quietly adapted themselves around these new conditions because they had little choice.

What we are now seeing are the early cultural and psychological consequences of that transformation.

Our young people are not simply becoming lazy, disengaged, or fragile. Nor are they merely victims of economic conditions alone. Something more profound is occurring beneath the surface of those explanations.

Increasingly, young people are losing the will to engage in the difficult relational practices that have historically constituted human social life itself. I do not mean “the will to live” in the narrow clinical sense. I mean the gradual weakening of orientation towards those messy, demanding, embodied forms of existence through which human beings have constructed meaning for millennia: friendship, romance, intimacy, conversation, shared risk, boredom, collective experience, delayed gratification, institutional belonging, intellectual struggle, public presence, sexual relationships, physical gathering, and participation in communities larger than oneself.

All of these things still exist, of course. But increasingly there are proxies available for them.

There are algorithmic substitutes for companionship. Digital approximations of intimacy. Endless simulated sociality. Curated belonging. Streamed personalities. Artificial affirmation systems. Frictionless entertainment. Predictive recommendation architectures. AI mediated emotional support. Gamified aspiration. Logistical optimisation systems which quietly reduce the necessity for embodied relational engagement.

And the proxies are becoming extraordinarily sophisticated.

Increasingly, the mediated version can feel easier, safer, cleaner, more manageable, and in some cases more emotionally convincing than reality itself. Jean Baudrillard described something like this decades ago through the concept of the hyperreal: representations becoming more compelling than the original human realities they replace.

This is why I believe we are entering the beginning of the largest anthropological transformation in modern history.

I’d like to introduce it here, it is the infrastructural turn.

Against the infrastructural turn, earlier intellectual movements such as the linguistic turn and the affective turn may eventually come to appear almost charmingly humanising in retrospect, still grounded in assumptions that human beings primarily construct meaning through language, discourse, embodiment, emotional presence, and relational attachment, rather than through the increasingly pervasive algorithmic and infrastructural systems now reorganising the conditions of agency and becoming themselves (Rorty, 1967; Massumi, 2002; Ahmed, 2004).

The infrastructural turn describes the historical transition from societies organised primarily through direct human, institutional, and spatial relations towards societies increasingly organised through digital, predictive, algorithmic, and platform based infrastructures that quietly reshape the conditions of human becoming itself.

The crucial point is that infrastructures do not merely organise behaviour externally. Increasingly, they reorganise agency internally.

In earlier educational cultures, agency still depended heavily upon embodied initiation: getting up, travelling somewhere, meeting people, enduring awkwardness, forming attachments, negotiating institutions, physically participating in shared environments, and inhabiting collective temporal rhythms. Human development emerged through friction, interruption, uncertainty, and relational complexity.

Today, agency is increasingly scaffolded through systems which minimise those demands. Educational participation becomes transactional. Students navigate interfaces, schedules, debt calculations, digital reminders, asynchronous content, and credential pathways. The university increasingly appears less as a community one joins and more as a service one accesses.

This shift matters profoundly because transactional systems gradually produce transactional orientations towards life itself.

And this process is subtle.

Young people are not consciously choosing ontological withdrawal. Their agency is being quietly reorganised through what I call infrastructures of the self: the layered digital systems which increasingly mediate perception, attention, decision making, sociality, aspiration, memory, identity formation, and temporal experience.

These systems operate softly. Through nudges. Notifications. Convenience. Optimisation. Predictive assistance. Reduced friction. Behavioural adaptation. Algorithmic anticipation. They rarely appear coercive. In fact, they often appear helpful.

That is precisely why they are historically powerful.

At the same time, universities themselves are entering a major structural crisis. The contemporary higher education funding model was always unstable because it attempted to combine a weakened social welfare settlement with a weakened market system. The result was neither fully public nor fully private, neither genuinely democratic nor genuinely competitive.

Two diminished systems combined together do not produce balance. They intensify contradiction.

Fees rise while institutional debt rises. Students accumulate extraordinary financial burdens within labour markets that increasingly fail to guarantee proportional return. Universities become dependent upon international fee markets, managerial expansion, platform efficiencies, and perpetual growth simply to remain operational.

Under such conditions, students respond rationally.

Many now calculate higher education primarily through debt exposure, employability, credential necessity, housing precarity, and diminishing economic return. Even highly capable students increasingly hesitate before postgraduate study unless it is directly tied to a clear employment pathway.

I see this in my own family.

At a much smaller and more personal scale, my own children achieved top grades, attended elite universities in their respective fields, and would traditionally have been ideal candidates for postgraduate study. Yet they are also intelligent enough to recognise the economic reality surrounding them. They do not automatically perceive another qualification as intellectual formation or civic aspiration. They calculate cost, debt, insecurity, and diminishing return.

And in many cases, they are right to do so.

This is not simply a crisis of attendance.

It is not merely a crisis of student wellbeing.

It is not even only a crisis of higher education.

It is the beginning of a civilisational transition in which human relational life itself is increasingly mediated through infrastructures that reorganise the conditions of agency, attachment, and becoming.

So thinking about it with the notional tools of the 1980’s and ‘90’s, the tragedy is that our educational institutions still largely lack the conceptual vocabulary to recognise the scale of what is occurring. Just as the THE article roundly points to two decades of data, without foregrounding the major shift that has happened in them. We continue to describe infrastructural transformations through the exhausted language of engagement metrics, attendance policy, employability frameworks, wellbeing strategies, and consumer satisfaction surveys.

But beneath those administrative categories, something much larger is beginning to move.

And so it begins.

Further Reading

Read the THE article here: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/students-missing-twice-much-teaching-time-20-years-ago

Read Ontological Capture here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-025-02807-8

Refs:

Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by S.F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rorty, R. (ed.) (1967) The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.